Woman travels 3,000 miles from Washington DC to Glasgow to attend friend’s wedding — only to end up at the wrong venue

A woman who travelled more than 3,000 miles from Washington DC to Glasgow to attend her friend’s wedding has gone viral after she shared a video about how she ended up at the wrong reception.

Arti Mala posted a TikTok video about the mishap, which showed her standing outside a church in Glasgow with the wrong wedding party because she had misjudged the amount of time she had between the ceremony and the reception.

The businesswoman said she attended her friend’s ceremony, but decided to return to her Airbnb “five minutes away” to get changed and have a little rest before the reception. However, this turned out to be a huge mistake due to rain and problems with getting a taxi to the reception venue.

In the initial video shared by Mala, which garnered more than 430,000 views, she met the bride and groom of the wedding she had mistakenly stumbled into. However, they saw the funny side of things and laughed together about the blunder, before Mala got into an Uber to get to the correct venue.

However, she was so late to the wedding she was meant to be at that she had missed the speeches. In a follow-up video, she detailed how she was meant to be the couple’s “unofficial videographer” but had missed out on several crucial moments while she was in the wrong place.

She spoke of how her friend’s wedding was a cross-cultural one with a British-Punjabi groom and Scottish bride. The couple had organised for “fun surprises” to showcase their heritages, including someone playing the bagpipes alongside a dhol drummer.

“I missed all of it,” she told viewers sadly.

Mala explained that she went back to her Airbnb right after the ceremony, but did not realise that “Uber was running particularly slow that day” and that it would “take so long to get from Point A to Point B”.

She also made a mistake when entering the name of the reception venue into the taxi app, because of their similar names. Guests went from Pollok House to Pollokshaws Burgh Hall, just a mile away from each other.

But she accidentally typed in the destination as Pollokshields Burgh Hall, which was about two miles away from where she needed to be.

“I just didn’t think about it, I was flustered, I was trying to get out the door,” Mala said. “Once I got there, I sprinted into the hall because I knew I was running late and immediately, no one looked familiar, which is OK because I’m coming from out of town so I didn’t know a lot of the wedding guests.”

But it was only when she spotted a signboard that read “Congratulations Caitlyn and Stephen” when she realised something was wrong. She initially thought she was at the wrong entrance, but soon realised she was in the completely wrong venue.

Mala said she tried calling another Uber immediately, but none were available for some time. Two men walked out of the hall and after she told them what had happened, she discovered they were the groom, Stephen, and the bride’s brother.

They reassured her that they made the same mistake that morning and had initially gone to Pollokshaw instead of Pollokshields, where their wedding was taking place.

The bride, Caitlyn, also came to meet Mala and invited her to have a drink and stay at their reception if she wanted to.

However, Mala said: “I flew all the way for this very specific wedding and I’m supposed to be taking videos there. So I finally did get an Uber, showed up to the other event, sprinted inside and by then, their entrance was over, all the wedding speeches were over, appetiser course was well underway. I had missed all of it.”

She admitted that the groom’s father was “particularly upset” that she hadn’t been there on time, but reassured viewers that she “made it up to him later in the evening over drinks”.

“The bride and groom were super chilled, they were just happy I made it. It was one of the most fun and thoughtful weddings I’ve ever been to,” Mala added.

The Independent